Motley Crue: Rock And Roll's Bad Boys

While some bands make their name on music alone, others seem to acquire a reputation for the things they do offstage as well as their performance in front of an audience. One of the latter sorts of bands, Motley Crue, made its mark through the wild lifestyle of its members, and not just through music. What we find when examining the history of Motley Crue is a band formed by people with strong personalities that went not just for fame, but for a sort of popular infamy.

The birth of Motley Crue happened in California in 1980, when drummer Tommy Lee and bassist Nikki Sixx began to look for new members for Lee's band, Suite 19. They met guitarist Mick Mars at a time when he was offering his services as a guitarist through an ad in a local newspaper. The first meeting of the band Motley Crue began as nothing more than a drunken jam session in 1981, after which Mars joined Lee's band and fired Suite 19's incumbent guitarist.

The new band wouldn't settle on a name right away, however. Sixx suggested picking "Christmas," as a name that was familiar and popular with people, thinking that it would easily attract people to the band. However, members of the other band Mars played in at the time, White Horse, ended up telling the three that they made a "motley looking crue." Mars wrote that name down, and it eventually became the band's moniker.

Still, while Motley Crue had three musicians, they were still short one person to provide vocals. A longtime acquaintance, Vince Neil, was tapped to provide the voice for the band, but at first he refused. It was only when Neil's band, Rockandi, lost members due to other projects outside the band, that he joined up, completing the band.

The band's debut album, Too Fast For Love, was self-produced and initially sold 20,000 copies, while the band's manager, Allan Coffman, set up a tour of Canada for the group. Their manager used the band's success in the clubs of LA to help negotiate a record deal while on the tour, eventually landing with Elektra records in spring 1982.

Landing record deals wasn't the only thing that Coffman and assistant Eric Greif were good at, though. During the tour in Canada, Motley Crue was arrested for wearing their spiked stage outfits while going through airport security in Edmonton, accused of bringing weapons into the airport, and Vince Neil also was charged with bringing indecent materials, thanks to a carry-on filled with pornographic magazines. This turned out to be a PR stunt to get the band in the papers, as was a bomb threat against the band while in Edmonton. The PR did the job, getting Motley Crue in the paper, with Greif and Lee interviewed following the bomb threat.

This sort of behavior became commonplace for Motley Crue, which was known as much for their antics off the stage as their music on the stage. Under new management with Doc McGhee, the band found fame and exposure with the help of then-new television station MTV. Motley Crue continued to make the newspapers, particularly when Vince Neil was involved in a drunken collision in 1984 that killed the passenger in his car and led to a three-week stint in jail for vehicular manslaughter. But the fun didn't last, as Sixx suffered an overdose of heroin that nearly killed him in 1987, declared legally dead on the way to the hospital. It was with the intervention of McGhee that the band decided to clean up.

For much of the 1990s, Motley Crue was not together as a band, when Vince Neil left the band in 1992, replaced by singer John Corbai. Following the commercial failure of their 1994 self-titled album, didn't do well. Motley Crue reunited in 1997 with Neil back at the microphone, but their next album also didn't sell well. When the band's contract with Elektra expired, the group members re-released all their albums independently, though the band lost another member in 1999 when Lee left the band due to tensions between himself and Vince Neil.

The band members drifted apart in the early 2000s, with Sixx playing guitar in other bands and Mars secluding himself while suffering from a degenerating back condition. However, in September 2004, Neil and Sixx announced that they were going back to the studio to make music, and in December 2004, the four original band members announced a world tour. Currently, Motley Crue continues to play together and has released one compilation CD since reuniting. Over the last 25 years, Motley Crue has remained on the music scene, albeit with small breaks, bringing their style of glam rock and bad boy attitudes to the stage.

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